Newton

Newton was born into lower English gentry and attended Cambridge University. A great genius who spectacularly united the experimental and the theoretical-mathematical sides of modern science. Newton was also fascinated by alchemy. He sought the elixir of life and a way to change base metals into gold and silver. Not without reason did the twentieth economist John Maynard Keynes call Newton the “last of the magicians.” Newton was intensely religious. He had a highly suspicious nature, lacked all interest in women and sex, and in 1693 suffered a nervous breakdown from which he later recovered. He was far from being the perfect rationalist so endlessly eulogized by writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Excerpt: “A History of Western Society” ~ Authors -- John P. McKay / Bennett D. Hill / John Buckler

At the other end of intellectual spectrum, Isaac Newton devoted a large number of essays to the interpretation of apocalyptic scripture (posthumously collected into a single volume, ‘Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/Observations_Upon_the_Prophecies_of_Daniel.pdf) though he wisely refrained from predicting the Second Coming’s date. ` Page 66 Excerpt: "The Delusions of the Crowds"

. . . Even by the nineteenth century, this was old news: A century before, Isaac Newton showed how even extraordinary knowledge and intelligence failed to protect the investor from the bubble siren song. Newton was no financial novice; by the time of the South Sea Bubble, he had been Master of the Mind for nearly a quarter century. He had earned a generous return in South Sea shares that he had brought in 1712, which he sold at a significant profit in early 1720, but later that year lost his head and bought them back at much higher prices. This lost him around Pounds 2,000 and caused him to supposedly remark that he could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. ~ Page 121
~ William Bernstein (Author)